Re: OT: Fire Ants

>Fire ants (despite constant swollen knuckles) are beneficial in several
>ways. On our farm we have:
>	1) no slugs or snails
>	2) no grasshoppers
>	3) no catepillars
>

A colleague and I have been doing a series of papers on the terrestrial
arthropods of the Galapagos Islands (he does the collecting; I've never
been there).  He's found that the imported fire ant Solenopsis invicta has
virtually wiped out the soil and litter fauna in the Galapagos lowlands.

E.O. Wilson and ant expert Bill Brown (Cornell U.) correctly referred to
the fire ant problem as the Vietnam of entomology.  Literally tons of
highly toxic pesticides have been sprayed over much of the SE by the feddle
gummint with very  little effect on the ants.  However, many native
insects, some of them beneficial to agriculture, were seriously reduced,
and there are documented cases of serious human health problems as a
result.  Mass technological methods are not appropriate to deal with the
problem (though great for the revenues of the agrichemical companies that
run the US Dept of Agriculture).  Spot treatment where the problem is
severe seems to be best.

Don't know if this works (the fire ant has only been reported a few times
from extreme SE Virginia) but someone in Alabama told me that it is
possible to get rid of fire ants by taking a shovel full of one mound and
dumping it on another.  Supposedly this starts a war among the ants in
which one of the mounds will be wiped out by the other.  Keep doing this
until you have just one mound, then destroy it with hot soapy water.
Sounds too good to be true.

We are just now becoming aware of the real dangers of pesticides--that some
of them mimic mammalian hormones and can disrupt our development and
reproduction.  A group of scientists has recently advised that percieved
"benefits" of pesticides not be taken into account when assessing their
value; ANY health hazard should be deemed unacceptable in this process.  I
don't necessarily agree but it is interesting that this viewpoint is now
becoming highly respectable.

Two books to follow up on this:  OUR CHILDRENS TOXIC LEGACY:HOW SCIENCE AND
LAW FAIL TO PROTECT US FROM PESTICIDES by John Wargo, Yale U. Press, 1996,
and PEST MANAGEMENT AT THE CROSSROADS by C.M. Benbrook et al, Consumers
Union, 1996.  See the reviews in AMERICAN SCIENTIST for March, 1997, p. 195.

Bill Shear
Department of Biology
Hampden-Sydney College
Hampden-Sydney VA 23943
(804)223-6172
FAX (804)223-6374
email<bills@tiger.hsc.edu>
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